There are innumerable types of small boats, and almost as many ways of making them. With the advent of dressed lumber, hull forms could be ribbed or framed and planked to form a hull. However this produced an array of seams that had to be caulked and filled to try to reduce leaking, and only after weeks of immersion and swelling of the wood did the hull become reasonably tight.
The development of waterproof plywood simplified and improved boat building by forming panels without seams over the larger surfaces, particularly for "V" bottom or hard chine hulls, and only the chines, keel, stem, and transom had to be caulked. This provided a very much tighter hull with fewer and more manageable seams that could be made watertight with reasonable skill and care. However, even these boats required preset jigs, frames or ribs around which the plywood panels were drawn or fitted to form the hull.
A few full forms have been suggested that, with carefully cut panels, precisely drawn together along the edges of the cuts and fastened together by one means or another, will form a hull without the need for jigs and frames, or ribs preset to receive the panels. However, these still rely on separate pieces of plywood, precut in the form of the bottom and side panels, to be bent or curved, secured together, and attached to a transom and bow piece to form a boat hull.
Moreover, while these separate panels can be bent or curved, or even twisted, to a limited degree, to follow a bottom or side configuration, they can only be curved in one plane in any given portion of one panel. The panel inherently refuses and rejects curves in the longitudinal and lateral directions simultaneously.
A few innovations have been made to achieve secondary bends and curves. Slotting a panel at one end can form a "V" at the bow of an otherwise flat or slightly-curved stern in a single panel to use one panel instead of two and to be able to curve the plywood in two planes to form the bottom of the hull. This is seen in many patents such as that of No. 2,232,313, to Burch whose bottom panel is illustrated in FIG. 1 of the prior art.
Pat. No. 4,282,617 to Lundstrom, shown in FIG. 2 of the prior art, carries this one step further by providing cuts on either side of the panel aft to form side panels as well. However, anyone skilled in the art, who has worked with plywood, must know that cuts such as these can only be effective in very flexible materials, and only ease the curving of the panels to a limited degree.
It should be stressed that none of Lundstron's cuts overlap. While he shows cuts in the bow section 21, and in the stern sections 22, as well as amidships, not one of the cuts overlaps, even slightly, a cut coming from the opposite direction; nor are the cuts even close together.
The essence of the subject invention, as will be made quite clear in the following disclosure and claims, is not only a technical or accidental overlap of cuts from opposite directions, but an extensive overlap producing a distinct, relatively-narrow, strip of material that must have a tangible length-width relationship for a given bend.
While each of these references improves the state of the art, and adds resiliency and more compound curves in a given panel, neither of these patents--nor any in the prior art--provides any teaching, or suggestion, or even accidental disclosure of the overlapping cuts or compound cuts that are the essence of this invention.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a boat, and a method for building the boat, that requires an almost irreducible outlay of materials, time, and skill.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a boat that can be formed and constructed from a single sheet, or a few sheets of plywood, without molds or jigs, in a few hours, by a person of average skills.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a novel way of cross-cutting panels axially to provide a single unit that can be formed into a hull.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a small boat, and a method for making the small boat, that can be formed from a single panel of semi-resilient material, such as plywood, by certain cuts that permit the panel to be folded beyond its normal resiliency, into a hull form.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a method of making a small boat, and a boat, that can be formed from cuts made in a single panel of plywood, that includes the transom, as well as the sides, bottom, and stem. These and other objects will become apparent from the following summary, specification, and drawings.